Advertisement BEAT THE HEAT wit haT - s h i rt f eat u r i n g you r favorite New Yorker cartoon. fr ' , ,, On Sale. Online. Same great shirts, new low price. Only $19.95 I N'" - o o N .8 ê) ..s::: u I-< ro ro ?_ I Þr<.oCE JtI More than 85,000 cartoons to choose from. Order online at The Cartoon Bank. WW CARTOONBANK.COM , M 1-800-897-8666 78 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 24, 2006 THE THEATRE CZECHS AND BALANCES Tom Stoppard on Prague's rock revolution. BY JOHN LAHR "Ì" o o N (]) (]) 1t:: a (]) -5 " H ail, hail, rock 'n' roll / Deliver me from the days of old," Chuck Berry sang in the late fifties. From the outset, the rollicking beat of rock music was seen as transformative. The sound cast an irresistible spell over the imagina- tions of the young, for whom it was a call to action, to rebellion, and to ecstasy, not necessarily in that order. In a time of cul- tural turmoil and high anxiety, corrupt- ing the world with pleasure was rock and roll's messianic mission. But even the philosophes of fun couldn't have predicted just how wild a ride the music would en- gineer on the world's stage. Tom Stop- pard, in his latest intellectual piñata, "Rock'n' Rolf' (transferring from Lon- don's Royal Court to the Duke ofY ork' s on July 22nd), which is set in Cambridge and Prague between 1968 and 1990, contrives to look at music horn the per- spectives of both the West and the East. Stoppard, who was born T omás Straüssler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, ar- rived in England, via Singapore and India, in 1946, a nine-year-old refugee from the Nazis. "I put on Englishness like a coat," he told the Independent re- cently. "It fitted me and it suited me." Now a knight of the realm, and revered as one of his generation's most important playwrights, Stoppard has been amply rewarded by the culture he adopted. Al- though he has written more than twenty plays and numerous scripts for :film and television, "Rock' n' Roll" is only his sec- ond attempt to imagine himself back in the Czech landscape. The first was "Pro- fessional Foul," an excellent 1977 TV play, which dealt with a soccer-loving professor of ethics whose moral horiwns are widened by the false arrest of a former student. In "Rock' n' Roll," those widen- ing horiwns belong to J an (the out stand - ing Rufus Sewell), a twenty-nine-year- old Czech Marxist scholar who in 1968 leaves the doctoral program at Cam- bridge "to save socialism" at home by supporting the liberal agenda of the Communist leader Alexander Dubcek. In the eyes of his rebarbative British tutor Max Morrow (the fiery Brian Cox), who calls himself "the last white rhino," Jan is a "bed-wetter." Max is a hard-line Communist who thinks that Czechoslo- vakia's "going it alone is going against the alliance." He has no truck with Dubcek, "a reform Communist," as J an calls him-"Like a nun who gives blow jobs is a reform nun," Max sneers. Max is a true believer in the U.S.S.R. "If it wasn't for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country'd be a German province now-and you wouldn't be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss every- where except the toilet, you'd be smoke up the chimney," he says. Max believes that the mind is "a biological machine" and that "the struggle was for socialism under organized labour and that was that. It wasn't a revolution of the head." Max's faith is in collective social jus- tice; Jan, as his love of rock music indi- cates, is ravished by the notion of indi- vidual freedom. Max won't have any of it: not the nineteen -sixties ("I was embar- rassed by the sixties," he says in 1990. "It was like opening the wrong door in a higWy specialized brother') or the new- fangled Euro-Communism ('Why call it Communism? . . . If I said to you, 'I'm a Euro-vegetarian, so I'm allowed lamb chops,' would you. . . laugh in my face?"). "Altering the psyche has no effect on the social structure," Max argues. Stoppard surrounds the materialist old bull with a number of intellectual picadors who prod and exhaust him with their romantic ide- alism. Max's cancer-ridden wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a classics professor who reminds her students that Eros means "uncontrollable, uncageable," uses her body to refute his reason. "Theyve cut, cauterised, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished," she tells him. "I am ex- actly who I've always been. I am not my